


it feels so scary getting old

by trashmouths (zelicious)



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-27
Updated: 2017-09-27
Packaged: 2019-01-06 00:38:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12200487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zelicious/pseuds/trashmouths
Summary: Richie wished his worse fear was clowns, he really did.





	it feels so scary getting old

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! I wanted to do a quick one-shot in the canon universe with a different take on what happened in the Neibolt house because it's okay to be sad sometimes, too. A quick warning that there are mentions of domestic violence and implied child abuse in this, but nothing graphic! However please keep that in mind going in if you are sensitive to those topics. I'm going off of the 2017 film canon as opposed to the book canon.

 

 

“Fucking crackhead house,” Richie hissed to himself as he followed Bill down the decrepit hallway toward where they’d seen Betty goddamn Ripsom get dragged to what he presumed was her death. Soon to be his own death, by the look of things. Bill glanced over his shoulder to hush him.

“Really, Bill? What, is the fucking demon clown sensitive about his murder lair?” Richie whispered.

“Richie, shut the fuh-fuck up for once!” Bill turned back toward the end of the hall, just missing Eddie stopping behind them and moving toward the stairs again. The room was empty when they stepped inside, a dirty mattress laying nearby with an open door on the opposite side of where Betty had been dragged away.

“Where the fuck did she go?” Richie asked Bill, who turned to glare at him.

“It’s p-playing mind games with uh-us,” he explained.

“Well, I don’t wanna play anymore! This is fucked up, Bill, let’s get the fuck out of here!” Richie looked back to where they had just walked in and saw that the door was shut, though he didn't recall closing it. “Eddie? Where are you, dude? We’re leaving,” he called when he opened the door to find the hallway empty.

“Richie,” a voice whispered, sounding like Eddie’s, but off in a way that Richie could not understand.

“Eds? Where’d you go?”

“Richie, help me,” the voice, _Eddie_ , Richie corrected in his head, called. It sounded distant and calm, so unlike the panicky boy Richie knew and loved. But Richie wasn’t thinking about tones and vocal nuances, he was thinking about Eddie being in trouble, Eddie asking for help. He rushed into the room that the voice had come from, only realizing after the door slammed behind him that Eddie, or whatever it was, hadn’t commented on the reviled nickname.

“Fuck me,” Richie gasped, yanking on the door handle, “Bill! Bill! Get the fucking door!”

“Stop yelling,” a new voice slurred. Richie glanced over his shoulder and found that the room he had entered had shifted while he’d been looking away. It was now the entryway of what seemed like an extravagant house, with huge windows overlooking a glittering city and shiny marble floors. Not outright scary, but ominous, somehow. It was beautiful, but it was empty and cold.

“Who’s there?” Richie called out, his voice shaking. A chuckle echoed from farther inside the house and Richie figured since the door didn’t seem to be working out, he might as well see what the fuck was going on inside whatever fucked up illusion the clown had prepared for him.

“Don’t recognize me, Trashmouth? Why, I’m bruised as a peach,” the voice crooned. It was his Southern Belle accent, but more sinister, and in a voice much deeper than his own. He crept down the hall, flinching at every loud squeak that his sneakers made against the marble. At the end of the hall there was a dark living room. A dim lamp was shining next to a couch with a man lying limply across it, an nearly empty bottle of Scotch clutched in one of his hands. “Aw, goodness me, weren’t we a cutie back in the day?”

“What the fuck?” Richie asked, more to himself than to the man. He backed into a wall and felt around for a switch, relief flooding him when the room filled with bright light. The feeling was short lived though, when he was able to fully see who was on the couch in front of him. “Oh my god.”

“I never was polite,” the man groaned, shielding his eyes from the light. Not just a man, but Richie. He was older, his own father’s age at least, and looking worse for the wear with his curly hair nearly matted against his scalp and a patchy beard covering the rest of his face. “Be a dear and hand me another bottle huh, little Richie? Anything will do.”

Richie suddenly noticed the bottles that were piled all around the room like some kind of depressing art instillation. It looked almost like his own living room at home, but turned up by ten. Old Richie was looking at him expectantly with unfocused, bloodshot eyes.

“No fucking way, you’ve clearly had enough, asshole,” Richie snapped.

“Watch it. That’s yourself you’re talking to, short stuff,” Old Richie warned. Then his face shifted into a grotesque, nostalgic smile. “You sound just like Eds.”

_Eddie_. Fuck, Richie was supposed to be looking for him, and now he was trapped inside some fucking time jump with his own shitty self from the future. “You know where Eddie is?” he asked carefully. His older self snorted.

“No, no. And he keeps it that way too. Haven’t seen him in two or three years, I think,” Old Richie mumbled, sounding genuinely upset. “Not since the divorce.”

“Divorce?” Richie wondered aloud. He tried to connect the dots, but couldn’t understand why Eddie wouldn’t speak to him after Richie got a divorce. Or maybe Eddie had gotten the divorce? But that didn’t make much sense either. Old Richie snorted derisively and gestured with his free hand at the wall that Richie was leaning against. He turned slowly, half-expecting to find some kind of blood and gore behind him, but it was just a normal wall covered in framed photographs.

There were a few photos of the whole Losers’ Club, at the age they were now, and older. One of him and Eddie at graduation, arms thrown around each other, which Richie grinned at. There were more pictures of the two of them together, at the beach, at a showing of the Rocky Horror Picture show dressed up as Dr. Frankenfurter and Rocky, posing in front of the Hollywood sign, at what appeared to be a red carpet event. More were of just Eddie, candid shots of him sleeping or laughing or cooking; scenes that seemed so intimate that they made Richie’s face heat up. The biggest photo, around which the rest surrounded, was of all the Losers’ dressed formally, Richie and Eddie in the middle kissing at an alter and the others captured mid cheer. Divorce.

“Holy shit! I marry Eddie?!” Richie shrieked, his hands moving to grab the frame of the photo as if he were going to yank it down off the wall and keep it. Part of him wanted to.

“Yep. And then he divorces you,” Old Richie said.

“Why the fuck? What’d you do?” Richie rounded on his older self now, enraged.

Old Richie blinked his eyes, no longer magnified by coke-bottle glasses, at the menagerie of liquor bottles surrounding him. Richie shook his head in disbelief.

“No way,” he said, “I’d never. I’d never turn into–“

“Mom?” Old Richie sneered his teeth yellowed by decay just like hers. “Oh, you turned into something even worse. The drinking Eddie could put up with. He didn’t like it, of course, but he put up with it, ‘cuz he loved you, old Eddie Spaghetti, yes he did.” Richie felt like he was going to vomit. “The drinking he could handle. But you got mad so much easier, Rich, and he was always complaining. Just like his fat fucking mother, little Richie! So you started to hit him, that was the only way to shut him up.”

“Fuck you!” Richie screamed. Tears were streaming down his face, mixing with the cold sweat that had broken out all over his body. “I would never! I would never!”

“But you did, little Richie! You did! And he didn’t even leave at first,” Old Richie laughed. “No, he'd stick around after you’d bruise him up, baby. He loved you so much.”

“Shut up,” Richie sobbed, now leaning all his weight against the wall since his legs could no longer hold him up.

“You know what finally made him leave? You know what you did?” Old Richie asked. He’d gotten right up in Richie’s face somehow. His breath stank like booze. It smelled just like when his mother would come out of her neglectful stupor once in a while to scream at him. He choked back a gag. “You broke his little arm, Richie. You snapped it with your bare hands.”

Richie shoved the older man back with a hard shove to the chest, sending him tumbling backward into a mountain of bottles. “You’re lying!” Old Richie’s eyes flashed yellow and his teeth grew sharper. “This isn’t real,” Richie yelled. “You’re just that ugly fucking clown!” Old Richie’s skin grew paler, his hair starting to shift from black to brown to red. Richie spared one last glance at the wedding photo before taking off toward the door, praying to god he’d be strong enough to force it open this time.

“Beep beep, Richie.”

The door opened just as he was about to barrel into it, and he fell hard into the dirty wood floor of the house on Neibolt. Bill slammed the door shut behind him.

“Ruh-Richie, a-are you–“

“Where the fuck is Eddie?” Richie cut him off, staggering to his feet. A scream carried up from downstairs and Richie took off, barely pausing to make sure Bill was following. “Eddie!”

_It_ was there, hunched over Eddie’s kicking body. For a moment, Richie was frozen in fear, only able to watch as the clown slowly twisted its head around to look at him. All he could hear was the sound of Eddie’s horrified scream ringing in his ears. It stood and began to stalk toward them, and then a spear was going through its right eye and Bill was yelling, grabbing at his shoulder.

The rest of the Losers’ had come in and everyone was screaming. It was still standing in the middle of the room, momentarily stunned, but Richie couldn’t give less of a shit. He ran around it to Eddie’s side, his hands fluttering all over the smaller boy’s body. “Fuck, Eddie, what happened?” he asked, brushing the sweaty hair off his forehead. Before Eddie could answer he looked down and saw his mangled right arm.

“I’m gonna snap it back into place,” Richie said without thinking.

“Do not fucking touch me!” Eddie shrieked, moving his arm as far from Richie as he could without jostling it.

“I have to, it’ll be worse if I don’t,” Richie pleaded, his hands already grabbing at the limp weight of it cradled against Eddie’s chest. He popped it back and Eddie _screamed_ , but at least he could stomach the sight of it now. A voice echoed in his head, _you snapped it with your bare hands_ , and he rested his head on top of Eddie’s to push back the wave of nausea that washed over him.

Later, after Mrs. Kaspbrak had screamed at them and driven a weeping Eddie away, after Bill had punched him in the face, after he’d flushed his vomit down the toilet with a vindictive _take that, you fucking clown_ , he remembered the feeling of Eddie’s small hand squeezing his own as they’d run out of Neibolt, and pretended that it meant forgiveness.

 

 

 

Richie didn’t gather the courage to face Eddie again until a week later. He snuck over to the Kaspbrak house under cover of darkness, following the route he could take with his eyes closed, and tapped gently on Eddie’s bedroom window. To his surprise, Eddie had let him in and sat next to him on his bed, quietly staring at the floor as he covered his cast with his good arm.

“It’s my fault,” Richie whispered after almost five minutes of silence. “That you broke your arm,” he clarified when Eddie glanced at him in confusion.

“Don’t be a fucking idiot,” Eddie said with no real malice, “I broke it when I fell.”

“I still hurt you.” Richie refused to get off scot-free. Eddie shrugged.

“The doctor said you did a good job,” he said with a small smile. A laugh forced its way out of Richie’s throat.

“No shit? Watch out, Eds, there’s a new doctor in town,” he teased.

“Don’t call me that, Trashmouth,” Eddie laughed. He moved his arm to shove at Richie’s shoulder, only noticing what he’d done when he felt Richie stiffen.

“What the fuck? Who wrote that?” Richie demanded, grabbing Eddie’s good wrist before he could cover the writing on his cast again.

“Gretta Keene,” Eddie mumbled, an embarrassed flush on his freckled cheeks. “She told me it was sad that my cast was blank, so I let her sign it, and she did that…”

“Gretta Keene is a fucking cunt,” Richie said. Eddie didn’t say anything, and Richie saw a glimmer of tears in his eyes, so he leaned in and kissed him. “You’re not a loser, Eddie,” he said fiercely, throwing his arms around Eddie’s trembling shoulders. Slowly, Eddie’s arms came up and pressed against Richie’s back. They fell asleep holding each over close underneath Eddie’s covers in case Mrs. Kaspbrak came in. Before he left in the morning, Richie put a big red V over the S on Eddie’s cast.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I'll be writing some more in my very happy, Pennywise free universe soon.


End file.
